I got it spectacularly wrong. In a journey that started with seminary at age 50, a time when I got so much right, this I got wrong.

This is a story of discernment; how I didn’t discern God’s will until the very end.

I had graduated from University of Dubuque Theological Seminary and accepted a position as bereavement coordinator for a hospice in southern Wisconsin. Serving in hospice was the dream that drove my schooling as a 50-year-old. Even though I was passionate about serving people who are grieving, I was hesitant about my new position. I wasn’t in my hoped for role as chaplain, but I was still in hospice, still caring for grieving people.

My husband and I moved from Illinois and settled in Wisconsin, finding a church home that seemed a good fit. As our new church moved toward the decision to leave the Reformed Church in America (RCA), we amicably left the church. As an ordained pastor in the RCA, I intended to remain aligned with an RCA congregation.

After several months, I received a phone call from our former church. The pastor was taking a three-week sabbatical. The consistory asked if I would provide pulpit supply for them. I was honored they had reached out to me and I agreed to preach.

The three-week sabbatical soon morphed into the pastor leaving the church. Immediately. And Easter was right around the corner.

While I grieved for the broken relationship between church and pastor, I was also excited about this opportunity for myself. After the initial three weeks of preaching, I also preached on Palm Sunday and Easter, and provided many Sundays of pulpit supply in the coming months. While I couldn’t preach every week, I preached at least once a month as well as special services including Advent, Christmas Eve, and the following Palm Sunday and Easter. I felt like God had created space for me to become their senior pastor.

I submitted my application, interviewed, and anticipated that the church would call me to be their pastor. I was so confident that I once stopped at the church, placed my hands on the bricks of the building, and claimed it as the place I would serve as pastor. The following Thursday the search committee informed me that they were not calling me; they would call another pastor.

What follows is my response, my grief, and my journey toward peace as chronicled in my journal, sometimes as prayer and sometimes as reflections knowing God was reading along as I wrote:

 May 12

This is the first full day of knowing that you have not called me to be their pastor. What have I been doing for the last year? Waiting and working so hard, feeling sure you were preparing me for this position. Somehow, I have to re-order my world, my hopes and dreams. Somehow, I have to make peace with remaining with hospice. I don’t see that you have a plan for me other than carry on and make the best of it. Make the best of it. Really?

May 14

In the movie Guardians of the Galaxy 3, there is a storyline focused on how the character of Rocket had been created. While his creator had evil intent, other hands guided him into who he was. “There are the hands that made us and the hands that guide the hands.”

I have deep pain ahead as I learn who was chosen over me, as I feel anger over being set aside, not good enough to be senior pastor. This is their creation, and, Lord, your hand guides their decision.

Was this position too important to me? Was I inserting myself into your voice?

May 30

I must have missed something big from God. I thought God had confirmed my call, that the Holy Spirit stirred in my heart every drive past a small rural church, when I sat at the coffee shop learning that the pastor was leaving. I kept feeling that God was saying yes to me, that his Spirit was speaking to my spirit. Others confirmed my call, “I see the fire in you when you talk about pastoring.” Do I not know what God sounds like? Did I spend the last 15 months deluded? God, you led me on.

What was going on for 15 months? I spent 15 months waiting.

June 6

At the bereavement conference today, we practiced a coffee filter activity, one that I had already done with a grief support group so I engaged with the activity casually. We were instructed to draw on a coffee filter a symbol of someone or something that we’d lost. When I had led the activity with my group, I had drawn symbols of my dad. But as I listened to the leader’s instructions, I was thunderstruck with the notion of my lost dream of pastoring the church. The tears of loss were almost immediate, as I colored a steeple with a cross on top, the symbol I had claimed throughout the journey of waiting, driving past churches. With a paintbrush, I dripped drops of water on my picture. As the water splashed down on my church steeple, I realized that God was crying with me. He, too, was sad about my lost dream. And I also saw that my picture had been obliterated by the water. Unrecognizable unless you knew. Over.

Following that workshop, I told my table group about my lost dream. After lunch, I called my husband and sobbed. I mourned anew my lost dream, my husband bearing witness. That evening, I met dear friends for supper. I told them the story of the coffee filter, of God weeping, and of the dream being obliterated by God’s tears. They listened. They prayed with me.

There was healing as I experienced the death of my dream through the coffee filter project. As I spoke about my loss, my lunch partners, my husband, and my friends bore witness to how I was mourning. Yet God was the first to bear witness. He didn’t explain, but he cried with me. He feels this with me. This is God with me. I couldn’t think my way here; I needed to experience my way, to feel my way. It was visceral. And my pain was witnessed. My pain was witnessed. Grief needs a witness. God, virtual strangers, my dear husband, and dear friends witnessed my grief.

But then, an explanation did begin to reveal itself. Are you saying, Lord, that you called me to our church for such a season as this, rather than a time? To help them through the unexpected loss of their pastor, for a season, to prepare them for their next pastor? That still hurts, but I do see it.

Who am I for you? A listener, a companion, a chaplain. Maybe not a senior pastor. Maybe not even a preacher. I will let others preach and exhort their story. And I will be their congregation.

“For such a time as this” actually meant “for such a season.” I did hear God speak; I wanted it to mean much more than a season.

God is saying to me, “You don’t have to do that hard thing of pastoring a church. You’re good in your role as hospice bereavement coordinator and chaplain. You don’t have to start over again. You don’t have to work so hard.” God obliterated my dream and somehow freed me at the same time.

August 3

I sense God’s invitation to give thanks for my season of leadership at church. Thank you for two years of getting to preach Palm Sunday and Easter. Thank you for the opportunity to prepare, write, and preach an Advent series. Thank you for the opportunity to perform baptisms for four children. Thank you for the funerals I officiated. Thank you for the close relationships I have developed with people at church. Thank you for how the congregation responded to my invitations to participate in worship. Thank you, God, for letting me pastor for a season.

August 22

When I walked through the brick memorial garden at the hospice house, I felt the beauty and peace of the space, and was present to the privilege of getting to do this work in this place. From the beginning of the seminary journey, I said I was going to seminary because I wanted to work in hospice. In the brick garden and as I re-entered the hospice house, I thought, “Wow, this was my call, and this is what I’m doing.” I visited another hospice house when I was trying to discern my future. I felt envious of everyone who got to work there. I felt God’s Spirit say to me, “This is what I called you to, Laura. This is where I brought you. This is where I want you to stay.”

I was missing how I am doing exactly what I had longed to do. Lord, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you gave me what I asked for, and then I said, never mind, I want something else. Thank you for keeping me where I belong.

August 24

While I have ongoing conversations with you, Lord, I confess that I trust too much my own voice. My voice was drowning out yours for the past year and a half. Was your voice the one that spoke so quietly on the days at hospice I couldn’t imagine leaving? Lord, I pray that your voice would overpower mine. And I pray that I would listen when your voice is speaking softly to me.

Sept. 13

I thought you had placed a longing in my heart to pastor a church.

I struggled with my new hospice position. For many reasons. I had changed everything when accepting the hospice position. A new state. Selling our house. Failing to find a home for our old cat. My husband needing a new job. Finding our apartment. Finding a new church. Leaving our friends who were family. My new job. I was working for a medical organization where everything I did had to be documented. I didn’t like making mistakes, having to fix things, and not even knowing how to fix things. The utter loneliness I experienced. Did I make the right decision? Is this where I belonged? Even though you confirmed often, Lord, that I was living out your call, I wondered. I never comprehended just how difficult the move and all the changes would be.

When my church asked for me so unexpectedly, I was sure I had my answer. I had my way out. God had answered, “For such a time as this, Laura.” I thought you were calling me to be Trinity’s pastor. You called me to their gap, and you asked me to stand in it. “For such a season as this, Laura.”

September 25

Thank you for trusting me with a flock, Lord. Today it may be those who come to the grief support group. It may be the people I support as they grieve, the patients I visit as chaplain, my co-workers. May my service to them ultimately be my service to you, God.

March 27

Wednesday of Holy Week. My heart sorrows as I feel the pain again of losing the dream of pastoring. The Lamb of God is so close. You understand my pain, my sorrow, my sense of being rejected. I still hear you telling me that your will was done.

May 8

One year since I found out that my church wasn’t calling me as their next pastor. I need to honor this one-year mark and grieve. I’m grieving the death of the dream to be senior pastor.

Part of the death is exposing what was unrealistic about the dream. I was running from hospice. I thought, “I don’t want to do this strange work that feels so clinical and unknown to me. I want to go back to what I know.”

When I have applied for jobs, I’ve most often got what I wanted. But this time, God gave me a hard “no.” When I pray the Lord’s Prayer, I feel the truth and God’s no of “Thy will be done.”

At the one-year mark, I borrowed a practice. At the one-year mark of her husband’s death, a woman read through all the sympathy cards she had received one more time and then threw them away. I went through the cards I received when I left our church five years ago. I had forgotten what people had written, thanking me for seeing their gifts and strengths, and encouraging them to use them, for offering people grace and acceptance. Those words of thanks clarified God’s call on my life: I am someone who sees the light in other people, and I draw the light out.

I wanted to believe that if things are uncomfortable or unfamiliar, they must not be God’s will. I I was uncomfortable in my new hospice role; going back to church was going back to the familiar. I am in God’s will at hospice, even in the hardest, most anxious moments.

Here’s the bottom line: I wouldn’t change a thing. God took something away from me, and it’s the best thing he ever did for me. I grieve for the loss of my dream to pastor a church. And I am also grateful to have had the dream and lost the dream.

Sometimes, even as Christians who want to know and live in God’s will, we get it wrong. In getting it wrong, I received so much grace. Grace from friends and family who comforted me and bore witness to my grief. Grace in the dawning awareness that I was called to an impermanent season, rather than the long haul. Grace that I knew for sure that God’s will was done.

The question that lingers for me is how do I know it’s God’s voice and not my voice? Maybe I can be confident that straying from the path isn’t a big concern for God. He’s still with me in the high grass where I’m hacking weeds to make a way through. He can make what I had wrong right again.